What Benedict XVI taught us about Israel—and why it matters now

When devout Catholic young people start approaching you, troubled by the possibility that God has abandoned the Jews and that they somehow stand behind our social ills, it becomes clear that something has gone deeply awry in our transmission of the Faith.

With the promulgation of Vatican II’s Nostra aetate sixty years ago, the Catholic Church decisively repudiated hostility toward the Jews and affirmed the Lord’s abiding fidelity to the people of Israel. Yet, an increasing number of Catholics today—especially the young—remain ignorant of this fact, the tragic history that precipitated it, and the Church’s consistent reaffirmation of it in the years since.

That antisemitic ideas are gaining traction among Catholics is not only alarming from a moral point of view but also a stark indictment of ignorance concerning the foundations of our own tradition. This semester, as I have been teaching my annual course on the Church and World Religions to another wonderful cohort of committed youth, I admit that I have been taken aback at the need to field doubts concerning the vital bond, rooted in history and alive in the present, that we as Catholics share with the Jewish people.

I have taught this class to about a thousand students over more than fifteen years. But, while an educator must always adapt to new challenges even as we hand on the perennial truths of the Faith, this semester brought something genuinely new: firm teachings of the Church are now often seen as equally or less credible than the incendiary claims propagated by online figures like Nick Fuentes, who allege that God has cast off the Jews and that our societal disorders are somehow all their doing.

I do not intend to engage such personalities directly here, as others, including George Weigel and Marcus Peter, have already made the points I would wish to offer on the recent resurgence of narcissism-fueled outrage present in certain Catholic quarters. Yet, at this moment when radical fringes peddle seductive solutions to society’s troubles—promises that for whatever reason involve scapegoating the Jews—the Church’s clear teaching must be retrieved regarding the people who were first to hear the word of God.

Ratzinger at Vatican II: Forming the Church’s Renewed Vision of Israel

As many readers of Catholic World Report will recall, Pope Leo recently marked the sixtieth anniversary of Vatican II’s Nostra aetate with a significant Wednesday audience devoted to recalling the Church’s enduring and intimate bond with the Chosen People. It was encouraging that our Holy Father has taken up this subject. However, it is also critical that we as parents, clergy, and educators make it clear that this perspective is not the idiosyncratic view of an American pope but a straightforward reiteration of what Nostra aetate taught authoritatively sixty years ago and which has been consistently reasserted by every pope since.

Aside from an isolated papal audience, this naturally raises the question of where Catholics ought to turn for reliable clarity on this matter.

As I often tell people, the answers to these sorts of questions are usually not hard to find, for they are typically sitting in plain sight in the Catechism. Thanks be to God, this is the case for the present topic (see, for example, CCC §§121, 674, 839-40, 1096). But, as is so often the case, no contemporary voice offers more clarity on this subject than Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), the towering figure who oversaw the production of the Catechism.

To appreciate Ratzinger’s body of work on this subject, we should begin with the understanding that the question of the Church’s stance in relation to Israel was for him more than a matter of mere academic interest. Shaped as he was by the moral witness of his anti-Nazi father and the scarring memory of the Shoah, the gravity of Jewish–Christian relations was impressed upon the Bavarian youth at an early age. And, as a testament to how central this question remained for him throughout his life, the Church’s relationship with the Jewish people was one of the small handful of major theological concerns that held Benedict’s attention until his dying days.

Ratzinger’s interest in the people of the Jews was forged in the crucible of Vatican II, where, as a young priest, he helped shape the Council’s teaching on the Church’s relationship with other religions, Judaism in particular. Serving as a theological expert at the Council, Father Ratzinger played a pivotal role in shaping its events as he drafted key speeches for the influential Cardinal Josef Frings. These interventions helped secure Nostra aetate’s explicit rejection of Jewish collective guilt for the crucifixion of Christ and strengthened its condemnation of antisemitism.

In this accessible document, the Church teaches that “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers” and speaks of Israel retaining “the first place” among those who have not yet embraced the Gospel. Highlighting the spiritual treasury common to Christians and Jews, the fathers of the Church’s most recent ecumenical council emphasized that Christianity draws from Judaism the entire Old Testament and, with it, the foundations of our faith. An especially important reminder amid denials of this foundational truth in our own time, this patrimony includes our very confession of the one, same, and true living God.

In Words and Deeds: Lived Solidarity with the Jewish People

Crucially, Benedict demonstrated his commitment to Israel not only through his words but through his actions. For instance, during a landmark visit to the Tempio Maggiore (Great Synagogue of Rome), the pontiff underscored “the solidarity which binds the Church to the Jewish people” and our “spiritual fraternity,” noting that “[m]any lessons may be learnt from our common heritage.” Furthermore, Benedict forcefully renewed the Church’s irrevocable commitment to reject “the scourge of anti-Semitism.”

Similarly, in his poignant address at the Reichstag in Berlin, the pontiff highlighted the Church’s “great closeness to the Jewish people” and the “special bond” we share with them as “beloved brothers.” In saying this, Benedict was merely reinforcing a longstanding commitment at the heart of modern papal teaching, which Pius XI had already insisted on with unmistakable firmness back in 1938 amid the rise of Nazism: “Anti-Semitism is unacceptable. Spiritually, we are all Semites.”

From the standpoint of the New Testament as understood by St. Paul and indeed by Jesus himself, Christianity is not a separate religion set over and against Judaism. It is New Covenant Judaism, the faith of the patriarchs and prophets brought to fulfillment in Christ.

What is more, during his papal tenure, Benedict prayed in a synagogue three times. During his 2005 visit to the historic Synagogue of Cologne, the pope reflected on the fortieth anniversary of Nostra aetate and the sixtieth anniversary of the end of Nazi tyranny, condemning anti-Semitism and reaffirming that “all men and women have the same dignity, whatever their nation, culture or religion.”

Beyond meeting and praying with Jewish brethren, Benedict also took practical steps to heal Jewish-Christian relations internally within the Church.

For instance, the pontiff took concrete steps to reform the ancient Good Friday prayer for the perfidis Judaeis (“treacherous Jews”). Although John XXIII had already removed the adjective ‘treacherous’ from this text in 1962, Benedict considered its harshness still unacceptable, for until 2008 the older form of the Roman rite continued to say that God’s mercy embraces “even Jews,” asking the Lord to heal “the blindness of that people” that they “may be delivered from their darkness.”

Having made the older liturgy more widely accessible with his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, Benedict exercised his prerogative as Supreme Pontiff and personally modified this prayer for the Jewish people so that it now beseeches God to “illuminate their hearts, that they acknowledge Jesus Christ is the Savior of all men…that even as the fullness of the peoples enters Thy Church, all Israel be saved.”

With this change, Benedict’s goal was “to create a form of prayer that suits the spiritual style of the old liturgy, but accords with our modern knowledge about Judaism and Christianity.” And yet, in a twist of irony (especially given the state of affairs today), Benedict’s undertaking was widely met with criticism and panned as anti-Semitic.

On the Indispensability of Rediscovering Christianity’s Jewish Roots

These lived gestures point to a deeper theological conviction that animated Benedict’s thought from the beginning: that Christianity cannot understand itself apart from its Jewish roots.

Over the course of his decades-long ministry, Benedict emphasized time and again that Christianity’s very spiritual patrimony arises in large part from our shared faith with the Jewish people and from the divine truths first given in the law, prophets, and wisdom of Israel. In this connection, Benedict frequently referenced the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s major study The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, a work issued during his tenure as head of the PBC and introduced by a preface authored by none other than Cardinal Ratzinger himself.

An especially important section of this preface addresses the 1920 thesis of the liberal theologian Adolf Harnack, who attempted to resurrect the heretic Marcion’s early second-century project of discarding the Old Testament and its allegedly separate and inferior deity. In response to this, Ratzinger stressed the indispensability of the Old Testament for Christians, affirming that Christians and Jews worship the same God and that “[w]ithout the Old Testament, the New Testament would be an unintelligible book, a plant deprived of its roots and destined to dry up and wither.”

Apropos of this, longtime papal biographer and interview partner Peter Seewald has emphasized that Benedict sought to showcase Judaism as “the noble olive tree onto which the Gentiles were grafted to become Christians.” In making this point, Benedict was indebted to St. Paul’s depiction of the Church of the Gentiles as a wild olive shoot grafted onto the ancestral olive tree that is the people of the Covenant (Rom 11:17-24).

Elaborating on this, he remarked that Jews and Christians alike “draw our nourishment from the same spiritual roots” and, though our relationship has at times been marked by tension, we “encounter one another as brothers and sisters…now firmly committed to building bridges of lasting friendship,” able together to “do much for peace, justice and for a more fraternal and more humane world.”

The Distinct Character of the Church’s Witness to Israel

Underscoring the Jewish roots of Christianity raises the question of what the Church’s gospel witness ought to look like with respect to the people of Israel. As Benedict teaches, it is a sui generis posture that is neither reducible to traditional mission nor to a bland religious tolerance.

To understand this approach, it is necessary to see its covenantal foundations. Taking his cue from St. Paul’s declaration that “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:28-29), Benedict affirmed with his saintly predecessor that God’s covenant with Israel was “never revoked by God,” which is to say that it is “indestructible,” “universal,” and “unconditional.” Particularly relevant at this historical moment, Benedict emphatically taught that supersessionism—the “theory of substitution” according to which Christians are supposed to have replaced the Jews as the Chosen People—“should be rejected.” In truth, he argues, Christianity’s fresh reading of the Old Testament involves neither simple continuity nor rupture—“neither a repeal nor a substitution, but a deepening in unaltered validity.”

Precisely because the covenantal bond between God and Israel remains alive in an irrevocable way, Benedict held that the Church’s stance toward the Jewish people cannot simply mirror her mission to the nations. In his 2018 essay “Not Mission but Dialogue,” the emeritus pontiff (now speaking not in a magisterial capacity but as an academic) reiterated a principle articulated by the Roman curia’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews: namely, that within the Church there is “a principled rejection of an institutional Jewish mission” in the sense in which she maintains such a mission toward the Gentile nations.

As Benedict explains, the reason that the Church’s position concerning Israel differs categorically from her mission ad gentes is not that Jews have no need of Christ, nor because evangelization to the Jews is forbidden tout court. On this very point, when asked whether it means that missionary activity should therefore cease, Ratzinger replied:

My answer is No. For this would be nothing other than total lack of conviction…Rather, the answer must be that mission and dialogue should no longer be opposites but should mutually interpenetrate. Dialogue is not aimless conversation: it aims at conviction, at finding the truth; otherwise, it is worthless.

The inner logic of Benedict’s teaching is that, unlike Paul’s proclamation of the Gospel to those who worshiped the “unknown God” (Acts 17), the Jewish people already know and worship the one true Lord and are not merely one pagan nation among others. His key emphasis is that Israel should not be approached as a pagan people to be converted, but as the elder brother who remains in a covenantal relationship with the one true God. As Benedict sees it, the Church’s task in relation to the people of Israel is to engage in an intentional and frank conversation about the crucial question of Jesus Christ’s identity as Messiah and Son of God.

It is not hard to see why this message has not been received well by everybody. To be sure, it is not among the most lucid statements ever to emerge from Rome, and the distinction being made here is so technical as to obscure its rationale for many. And yet, the Church’s intent has never been to discourage sharing the Gospel with our Jewish brethren or to prevent us from inviting them to follow Christ.

The Common Mission of Jews and Christians

Taken together, the above considerations reveal a twofold conviction in Joseph Ratzinger’s thought regarding Israel and the fulfillment of God’s covenantal fidelity in Christ.

On the one hand, he insists that, because God is faithful, the people of Israel “are not simply done with and left out of God’s plans; rather, they still stand within the faithful covenant of God.” On the other hand, he acknowledges with characteristic candor that “Israel still has some way to go.” This perspective stresses that the New Testament is not merely an optional addendum to the Old. “It is rather,” explains Ratzinger, “a matter of there being a real progression, and the Old Testament remains an unfinished fragment if you stop before you start the New. That is our fundamental belief as Christians.” Thus, when he was asked whether “Jews will have to recognize the Messiah,” Benedict responded that, while the how and when of this recognition rest ultimately with God, the answer to this is affirmative: “That is what we believe.”

In light of all the above, Benedict retained a clear-eyed realism in acknowledging that “the messianic promise will always be controversial.” We are not going to fully convince every Jewish person to follow Jesus any more than we are every Gentile. “In the meantime,” the emeritus pontiff wrote, “the two sides have the task of confronting one another in order to understand properly, each side considering respectfully the views of the other.”

As we conclude, the current cultural climate makes it timely to remember Benedict’s words about the “common mission” of Jews and Christians to defend human dignity and promote the common good in a world that is so often inimical to both. Even as Christians look for the day when all Israel will recognize Christ, Benedict deemed it the “basic task” of Jews and Christians to “delve more deeply into the truth” and “accept each other in profound inner reconciliation, neither in disregard of their faith nor in denying it, but out of the depth of faith itself.”

This posture of genuine humility is worth underscoring. For even as the Church never ceases to proclaim that she has been entrusted with the fullness of grace and truth, our popes also understood that we Catholics cannot bring about the lasting renewal of society on our own. To achieve this in a culture increasingly fractured by ideological extremism, Benedict insisted that we must return to our beginnings: to rediscover the roots of our faith in the religion of Israel, walking in real solidarity with the people who were first to hear the word of God.

This does not collapse the real distinctions between our traditions, but our popes are absolutely right that the stakes of getting this right are real. Indeed, it is indispensable in our present hour, as antisemitism resurfaces in new guises and a generation forms its convictions in online echo chambers. Yet, united by our shared history, we as Jews and Christians have been entrusted with the truth revealed by God and the common mission to proclaim it to a world desperately in need of the Lord’s mercy.

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